Thursday, March 28, 2013

Taking a look back through bookmarks of potentially "blogworthy" material this
morning, I came across a short post I'd
forgotten about regarding why highly skilled and talented people can be a hard
sell when courted to work on projects proposed by others. In particular, the
following two bullet points stood out to me:

People ... often dramatically underestimate the amount of development work,
or the complexity of it.

There's an opportunity cost to working on someone else's idea...

I could have understandably been accused of "scorning opportunity" a few times
upon realizing that some project or other entailed some combination of (a) much
more work than was apparent to the person making the pitch, and (b) the fact
that this work would keep me away from other, better opportunities.

Not all opportunities are equal, and some can actually be detrimental to one's
objectives even if they would look great to almost anyone else. It takes
experience in a field before the full payoffs and costs of an opportunity
become, as Daniel Tanner puts it, "blindingly obvious".